2013 was the year I started working on SDN – specifically in the area of devising professional services for Cisco ONE and Application Centric Infrastructure, ACI. A few months ago, I used a compendium to summarize my Cisco Domain TenSM blogs. This was well received, so I thought it would be a good idea to wrap up the year with a summary of my 2013 journey into the SDN world, and in particular the adoption challenges I learned about along the way, some of which are illustrated in the diagram below.

As children all around the world are eagerly anticipating Santa’s arrival on Christmas Eve, children in hospitals around the Americas were able to get their wish list in before the big day. This month, Cisco teamed up with several children’s hospitals with a Santa Connection project, which allowed children not well enough to visit Santa onsite to still communicate their wishes to him from their bedside using Cisco video.

I was able to work with one of these hospitals, Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, to augment the Santa Connection experience with a ‘Santa tracking’ app, which allowed children to know how close Santa was to making his virtual appearance to individual rooms in the hospital. An elf traveling ahead of the Santa Video team carried an iPad displaying a live webpage showing the location of the much-anticipated video visit. Here is a screenshot of the app experience:

Utilizing the Connected Mobile Experiences solution, which includes the REST APIs provided by the Mobility Services Engine (MSE), we were able to show the children where the Santa team was in relation to them – with a Santa icon where Santa’s video crew was and a smiley face showing the child’s current location. Read More »

The Set-top box sits at the heart of our home entertainment centers, providing hours of enjoyment for the best of what’s on television. Over the past few years, it has become clear that we can do better when it comes to reducing set-top-box energy consumption.

That’s why Cisco has engaged in a robust dialogue with energy advocates, television providers, other equipment manufacturers and, ultimately the Department of Energy (DoE), to see if common ground could be reached on the energy efficiency of set-top boxes. Today, we are pleased to announce that a voluntary agreement has been forged.

This agreement preserves the highest quality consumer television experience, while making significant reductions in energy usage and greenhouse gases. This is a landmark agreement, which saves consumers money, protects the environment, and provides regulatory certainty for manufacturers and providers alike. That’s what I call a win-win-win.

Here’s what the agreement will do:

This agreement will save consumers at least $1 billion annually in energy costs, it will save 500 megawatts of energy every year (enough energy to power 4 million light bulbs all year round) and will prevent five million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

It commits PayTV providers to deploying energy efficient set-top boxes to at least 90% of all subscribers nationwide. Additionally, Cisco and other manufacturers are committed to design, build and provide set-top boxes and multifunctional gateways that meet stringent energy efficiency requirements, while maintaining the ability to provide the anytime, anywhere, any device video experience consumers have come to expect.

Cisco is proud of this agreement, and we look forward to providing our customers with cleaner and greener set-top boxes, so we can all return to our regularly scheduled programing.

Well what a fantastic year it has been in the British Innovation Gateway (BIG) programme — Cisco’s initiative to discover, support, and accelerate innovation and growth amongst tech-based “start ups” across the UK.

We started the year with the objective of achieving a minimum of 3 things – running another successful BIG Awards competition in 2013, opening our Innovation Centre in the Shoreditch district of London, and hitting critical mass with the National Virtual Incubator. But as we come to the end of 2013, it is clear we have achieved so much more!

Things kicked off in January when I joined several hundred like-minded people at the great Spigit Innovation Summit (SIS 2013) in Dana Point, California and we presented a keynote on the BIG programme and how it sits at the centre of our London 2012 Olympic Legacy. It was fantastic to share the stage with such inspirational leaders and speakers as Sir Ken Robinson (a TED veteran) and Paul Pluschkell, founder and CEO of Spigit (now Spigit Mindjet), not to mention many of their leading Innovation customers such as Citibank and Novartis who also took part.

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